Sheila Rowbotham...'I wasn't good at being an individual star.' Photograph: Martin Godwin

When Sheila Rowbotham was refused her request to stay on as a professor of gender and labour history at Manchester University earlier this year, she wasn't expecting an outcry. The university's decision could have been seen as a little mean-spirited - after all, it came not long after their employment of Martin Amis on a part-time salary of £80,000 - but Rowbotham was reaching the retirement age of 65, and it is hardly unusual to enforce a contract.

So Rowbotham was astonished when the Save Sheila campaign started spreading. Colleagues across the country wrote to the university demanding that she be kept on. Emails poured in from academics in Ireland, Spain, Italy, France, Finland, Israel, Holland, India and the US. Rowbotham's students set up a Save Sheila site on Facebook. As one colleague put it, "she is our very own icon".

Rowbotham says that the response left her "overwhelmed. I don't think I have good stamina for battling with institutions. But I was really moved by it all, particularly the backing of the students. I was interviewed on local television with some of them, and, while I looked rather ghostly, they were wonderfully fresh and alive!"

Now, with a new professorial title and funding, Rowbotham is back at Manchester, and, with hindsight, the battle to save her seems unsurprising. Rowbotham is one of Britain's most important, if unshowy, feminist thinkers, and a key figure of the second-wave. She was among the organisers of that landmark event, the first National Women's Liberation Conference, in 1970, which led to the announcement of the four still hugely relevant demands of the movement: equal pay; equal education and opportunity; 24-hour nurseries; free contraception and abortion on demand. Rowbotham says she imagined this as the start of "an entirely new kind of politics - no leaders, no ego trips, no more sectarian disputes. We were going to be concerned with working-class women's lives - not just the privileged - and it was going to be about bread and roses." The reality was "in some ways much more than we imagined, and, in some ways, very much less."

Rowbotham was born in 1943 to proud lower-middle-class Yorkshire parents, and she rebelled against her strict Anglican father at an early age, turning first to Methodism, and then to Marxism. Having won a place to study history at St Hilda's College, Oxford, she came into contact with some of the great leftwing minds of the time, including Eric Hobsbawm, E P Thompson and the economist Bob Rowthorn, with whom she had an intense love affair. In her early 20s, she spent a beatnik year in Paris, observing street politics, and narrowly escaping a brutal rape.

But it was after plunging into radical politics in the 1960s that she began to consciously experience "inward rustlings of resistance". Recalling one of her first feminist articles, Rowbotham observes in her 2000 memoir, Promise of a Dream, "I knew I must not write from received authorities but from my own observations and feelings. As the words splattered out on to the pages, it felt as if I had reached a clearing." Sexuality, trade unionism, birth control, wages, love: she brought these disparate concerns together in both her activism and writing. She still does.

According to her friend and fellow academic, Lynne Segal, "Sheila's early writing paved the way for feminist thought and scholarship in Britain". In the early 1970s Rowbotham published three key books - Hidden from History; Women, Resistance and Revolution; and Woman's Consciousness, Man's World. In 1983, Simone de Beauvoir hailed her as one of the most interesting theorists then writing.

But as feminism enlarged and divided, Rowbotham became uncomfortable. "I wasn't good at being an individual star," she says. "I just didn't enjoy it. It was a strain living up to others' ideas of what I should be like." And then there was what one male friend called her "enormous heterosexual enthusiasm", which alienated her from a sterner strain of radical feminism that attacked women's sexual relations with men.

Come the 1980s, the rise of Thatcherism and Having It All feminism rendered Rowbotham's concerns with the struggles of poor, political women searingly unfashionable. But she soldiered on. She went to Manchester in the early 1990s, and in 2000 published her totemic cultural history, A Century of Women, which investigated the lives of everyone from politicians to cleaners.

And now she is heading into the limelight again with her magisterial biography of Edward Carpenter, the 19th-century radical and gay campaigner. Rowbotham first discovered him as an idealistic student, and his work was a revelation; indeed, she was so intrigued by Carpenter and his contemporaries, that in 1997 she wrote a book about them, Socialism and the Common Life, with Jeffrey Weeks. But the charismatic Carpenter continued "to lurk about in my head", and she embarked on his biography in earnest in 2003. What interested her was that "he linked so many different causes. He was a gay man, friendly with feminist women. He was opposed to vivisection, a socialist who supported animal rights. He was interested in mysticism, wrote for the Fabians but had anarchist sympathies ... He was a visionary who was very interested in practical solutions."

Rowbotham has also been working on another major historical study. She explains that at the same time as the suffrage movement, there were many women who were also "concerned about welfare reform, active in local government - anarchist, socialist - who envisaged that it was possible to reorganise work, domestic labour and architecture. Women like Sylvia Pankhurst who took over a pub for cooperative childcare and called it The Mother's Arms, and Margaret Ashton who created a hostel for homeless women ... In their attempt to create a more social world, they remind me of women campaigning in poor countries now."

She admires the confidence of today's young feminists. "I was at a seminar with Naomi Klein and she was very impressive. She just cut through the objections of a fairly formidable group of men from the old and new left, in a way that would have been difficult for someone of my generation. And she did it without thinking." Other things have been eroded though, she says. "For instance, I would have assumed there was now an established interest in working-class women's history. But that's much less easy to write about these days ... It's not so difficult to talk about race and gender but surprisingly difficult to talk about class. It's like speaking into an empty space."

Teaching has put Sheila back in touch with a young, politicised set, and in writing the book about Carpenter, she hopes to bring this radical of another generation alive for a modern audience. "He is constantly vanishing, someone people have only half heard of. I would like people to discover him, to find the book relevant to things they're interested in now, to how people might live and how society could be."

In resurrecting Carpenter's life and politics, Rowbotham has rescued an earlier strand of the rich socialist feminist tradition of which she is also such an important part. As the furore around her Manchester appointment showed, this lady is not for vanishing.

• Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love by Sheila Rowbotham is published by Verso at £24.99. To order for £22.99 with free UK p&p, call the Guardian bookshop on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop.

About this article

Melissa Benn: Sheila Rowbotham is a most unshowy feminist icon

This article appeared on p14 of the G2 section of the Guardian
on Tuesday 21 October 2008.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 19.01 EDT on Tuesday 21 October 2008.
It was last modified at 12.36 EDT on Wednesday 22 October 2008.
It was first published at 19.07 EDT on Tuesday 21 October 2008.